In November 2005, shortly after its founding that February, then-nascent YouTube landed its first ever funding round: $3.5 million from the Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. And in order to raise this capital, Attach — a startup that enables users to share documents online — has uncovered the original pitch deck that YouTube’s founders utilized to woo potential investors.
The 10-slide deck (below) lays out the reasons that former PayPal execs Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube. It describes how they sought to fill a white space by converting and serving videos that had been heretofore too large to host and share. “We are already moving eight terabytes of data per day through the YouTube community — the equivalent of moving one Blockbuster store a day over the Internet,” Hurley stated rather presciently in a press release
at the time.Chen, Hurley, and Karim also describe potential features that might be added to YouTube in the future to generate revenue — including “charging viewers for premium content” — which, almost a decade later, has become a focal point for the company in the form of YouTube Red.
YouTube would go on to raise $8 million in a Series B round from Sequoia and ARTIS Ventures in March 2006 before being acquired by Google — which YouTube’s original founders called a chief competitor in the pitch deck — for $1.65 billion in November 2006.
Check out the original deck in full below:
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